In research published in Nature Communications, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan, along with collaborators in Europe and Japan, have identified a class of materials that displays clear evidence for stable skyrmions at room temperature and above, paving the way for the development of useful spintronics devices.

Magnetic skyrmions are tiny, nanometer-sized magnetic-spin vortices that emerge in magnetic materials. Because they are so small, they could potentially be used as extremely dense memory devices, with the presence or absence of skyrmions being used to denote bits in computer calculations. Achieving this could lead to the advent of a new class of low-power-consumption devices dubbed "spintronics", which include high-density magnetic memory.